Audience participation television systems with two way communication are well known. Exemplary is U.S. Pat. No. 4,591,906, May 27, 1986 for Wireless Transmission from the Television Set to the Television Station. This system provides for instantaneous audience response to questions contained in television program pictures that may be processed from very large audiences of millions of subscribers on line in real time at a central processing station, typically at a TV transmitter station. Provisions were made for identifying each of about 29 million individual subscribers with narrow band unmodulated r-f beep signals within the range of a television broadcast signal so that this system is well adapted for a large city environment.
In the above identified co-pending applications, herein contained in entirety by reference, the local TV station transmission area audience participation was extended nationwide by means of processing audience response signals over satellite links. This was possible because there was no need to store and recall data, and no telephone lines were used with their system switching and limited peak load capacity bottlenecks, making them incapable of processing a nationwide audience instantaneously. Thus on-line real-time audience responses to polls with instantaneous nationwide audience surveys are made possible. These systems also are most advantageous in providing armchair responses without interruption to viewing of a program so that impulse voting and purchase decisions without afterthought was made feasible. This was achieved by means of a remote controlled cursor positioning control unit that positioned the cursor at a particular voting position on a television picture screen menu format. Computers at the local response units were operable to precisely define, time and transmit answers and to process therewith such other information as subscriber identification. The remote control units were further used for other functions such as channel switching, VCR unit operation and manipulation of television set controls such as loudness, etc.
Prior art audience participation systems in general were single purpose systems in that they controlled data such as votes in response to polls or kept TV set operating history for periodic billing purposes However, occasionally an auxiliary audience interactive feature was provided such as playing of video games, as shown in U. S. Pat. No. 4,630,108 for Preprogrammed Over-the-air Marketing Research System, Dec. 16, 1986, E. R. Gomersall. However in such systems, any satellite communication features were limited to conventional broadcast of TV programs, and telephone systems were necessary to relay stale stored participation and operation data off-line.
Thus such prior art systems have not been able to provide either real time instantaneous purchases, voting, communication or comprehensive interactive by audiences.
Furthermore prior art systems have not been versatile enough to provide customized participation features for the particular interests and financial capacities of a wide range of subscribers.
Accordingly it is a general objective of this invention to provide improved comprehensive interactive TV systems having instantaneous on-line nationwide communication capabilities.
It is a further object of the invention to provide customized interactive TV systems providing a variety of optional features for manual control of a subscriber and a choice of system features.